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Infographics have gotten pretty bad. The chart bubble has yet to burst, but it certainly is full of hot air. I've taken it upon myself to make fun of the worst infographics polluting the Internet. Today we start with a debt monkey.

First, an introduction. Feel free to skip ahead to the next page for the lampooning of a miserable attempt at data visualization.

I apologize to all social media/marketing gurus, shaman, mavericks, ninjas, guerrillas, rockstars, concierges, somaliers or whatever out there, but the ugly truth is that when it comes to social media and the content culture which feeds it, those who chase that magic Internet money are always significantly behind the current state of the medium. After all, the goal of this army of gurus and ninjas is to monitor what "real people" are doing, assess what "real people" want and figure out the ways in which "real people" consume the things they want. That's a whole lot of guesswork and analysis after the fact.

One of the great joys particular to social media, as opposed to say TV or print, is that you can watch this army in motion because you have access to most of the same information they do, specifically that most defining feature of social media, the numbers. Numbers drive everything and most data are available to the casually interested. Twitter is the high school cafeteria of the Internet because you can see everybody's popularity score. Facebook functions similarly to a certain extent. Alexa can tell you the reach of a website. Beyond these broad measurements, most sites allow you to view the success of an individual post, either through view counts, share counts or both.

Somewhere, in the middle of this mess of numbers, sits the social media/marketing shaman, casually unaware of the cultural insensitivity of his or her title, trying to piece together what it all means, how best to get you to open your wallet.

Because of these numbers, those whose professional purpose is to promise that your eyes meet their clients' content have decided that their arsenal's chief piece of artillery is the infographic. As in, kids love infographics these days, let's whip one up! Who cares if we have anything to say; get a few numbers together, draw something and next stop, viral!

This, of course, leads to wealth of horrible infographics and the first of what I hope to be a recurring series, Today in Horrible Infographics.